Eli fell onto his back, his head cracking against the ground. The shadows twisted and slithered around him as his other half dropped to his knees, cradling him as delicately as a mother holding her only newborn.
His eyes stayed locked on Eli's, but no words came only silence until he turned his head. Tears traced down his cheeks as he whispered, voice breaking, "He's not breathing…" His gaze stayed fixed on Eli. "I only saw him… and now he's dying."
The shadows stirred, restless, as if begging for Eli's life. A black smoke seeped into his nostrils, coiling around his neck, spilling over his body like a living shroud.
A low man's voice rose from within the darkness: "He's alive… don't worry."
Even his twin seemed to falter, laying Eli beside Elias's motionless form. It was as though they were trapped in the same nightmare bodies mirroring each other in stillness. And then… Eli's fingers twitched. Elias's chest rose. They moved together, as if the same breath, the same death, belonged to them both.
The air curdled cold, thick enough to choke.
The floor under Eli and Elias's feet blackened, planks curling upward like tongues of rotting bark. The hallway bled into a hospital that should not exist its walls breathing, its ceiling sagging under the weight of dripping mold. Every flicker of the buzzing lights made the shadows longer, sharper, hungrier.
They stood frozen in the doorway.
On the bed Laura.
Their mother.
Her skin was gray where it wasn't slick with sweat, her wrists lashed to the rails by trembling red threads that pulsed like veins. Her eyes were too wide, as if something inside them was trying to claw its way out.
Around her stood nurses but their faces were stretched flat, mouths sealed, eyes replaced by pinholes that leaked dark water. They didn't move. They didn't blink.
"No…" Laura's voice cracked. "Not this one not again"
Her scream ripped through the air.
Three cries answered.
One loud.
One soft.
And the third… silent yet its silence was so deep the floorboards shuddered, and the lightbulbs exploded in their sockets.
At the foot of the bed, three swaddled shapes appeared.
Two were handed to Laura Eli and Elias their newborn faces wet with life. She laughed, trembling, pressing her lips to their foreheads… until her gaze drifted downward.
"No…" she whispered, voice warping with panic. "I felt three…"
From the corner of the room, the wall began to blister. It split open, peeling like wet paper, revealing a woman stepping through a figure whose hands bled threads from split fingertips, each string writhing as though alive. Her head tilted too far to one side, neck bending like a snapped marionette.
Eli's chest locked. Elias's pulse roared in his ears.
The woman did not acknowledge Laura's sobs. She reached into the space between heartbeats, her threads snaring Elias… and the Spiral a third infant whose eyes were nothing but pits of turning darkness.
Elias's wails choked into silence. The Spiral's silent hum deepened until it felt like teeth grinding against bone inside their skulls.
Laura shrieked, clawing at empty air. "Give them back! He's mine!"
The woman's mouth opened far too wide. Words crawled out:
"One will forget. One will serve. One will burn."
And with a slow step backward, she melted into the wall, dragging Elias and the Spiral into the dark with her.
Laura clutched the only one left. Eli rocking him in the ruins of the bed. "I'll keep you safe… I'll keep you safe…" Her voice fractured into sobs.
Then she looked up straight at the grown men Eli and Elias had become and whispered:
"Eli… forgive me."
The world collapsed inward, the room twisting into a living spiral that pulled at their bones. Their vision tore, and they stumbled back into the present gasping, cold, and shaking.
But something in the air had changed.
One mother.
Three sons.
One stolen. One taken and returned. One still in the dark.
And somewhere in that dark the Spiral was afraid.
The spiral of darkness spat them out.
Eli hit the ground hard, coughing like he'd swallowed ash. Elias landed beside him, clutching his head, eyes rolling as if something was still inside him, scratching.
But the air wasn't clean here.
It was thick, humming with the same low silence they had heard from the third birth cry. The world around them if it even was the world twitched like film burning in a projector. Trees bent toward them at wrong angles. Their own shadows stretched toward each other, then merged.
Eli blinked. The shadow that rose from the ground was not theirs.
It was hers.
The red-thread woman's figure wavered in the dark, her head tilting too far, the threads in her fingers writhing like worms. She hadn't left with the wall. She'd followed.
Elias tried to stand, but the moment his foot hit the ground, a thread whipped out and wrapped around his ankle, burning into skin. He screamed.
Eli lunged for him only to stop cold when the woman's face became their mother's. Not the mother in the hospital bed, but Laura now, her cheeks hollow, eyes empty.
"My boys…" she crooned. But the voice was wrong wet, gurgling, like it was bubbling up from somewhere far below her throat.
Behind her, the air tore open, revealing a glimpse of the hospital again just the bed, soaked through, and the empty space where Elias had been.
The woman's gaze locked on Eli.
"You were the one she kept," she hissed. "The one she clung to. Do you know what it cost?"
The ground shivered.
Eli's vision stuttered flashes of Laura's hands covered in blood, of Elias being dragged through a screaming hallway, of the Spiral's eyeless face turning toward him in the cradle.
Elias gasped beside him, his eyes wide with the same flashes. They were sharing them now.
And in every flicker, the Spiral was closer.
The woman's threads tightened.
"One will forget. One will serve. One will burn."
Eli felt the choice closing in. Not a choice for him. A choice about him.
The darkness bent forward, threads whispering against his skin.
And then
A voice cut through it. Sharp. Furious.
"Let go of them."
The world snapped literally, like bone breaking and the woman's head jerked toward the sound.
Something was coming.
Eli staggered first, knees buckling as if the floor itself still writhed beneath him. His palms pressed hard against his temples, nails digging into his skin, desperate to shut out the echo of those newborn cries that weren't supposed to exist. His breath came ragged, shallow, sharp like glass slicing his lungs.
Elias didn't move. He stood trembling, his arms rigid at his sides, eyes wide and unfocused. His lips parted but no sound came, as though the scream he wanted to release had been stolen before it left his throat. He dragged in one breath, then another, chest heaving, shoulders twitching violently with each inhale. His hands clawed at the air, then his shirt, then nothing searching for something to hold onto that wasn't real.
The silence between them roared.
Finally, Elias choked out a whisper:
"Why… why do I remember her touch?"
Eli's gaze snapped to him, bloodshot eyes narrowing. He shook his head violently, strands of sweat-matted hair sticking to his forehead. "Don't don't say that. Don't you dare say that." His voice cracked, dripping with fear and fury all at once.
But Elias took a broken step forward, shaking, his mouth twisting as if the words themselves were poison. "I felt her arms around me. I saw her look at me. Not as a stranger… not as a ghost. As her son." His eyes shone wet, and he dragged a trembling hand down his face. "But she let go. She let me go."
The memory burned through them both Laura's gray face, her desperate arms, her cracking voice, that whisper of forgive me.
Eli's stomach lurched. His fists clenched so tightly his knuckles whitened. "No… no, it wasn't real it wasn't her! It was the Spiral it was showing us what it wanted us to see!" His voice rose, frantic, the words brittle as they scraped his throat. "It's trying to break us. It's trying to make us doubt her."
The floor beneath them groaned as though agreeing with him.
But Elias shook his head slowly, tears cutting down his cheeks. His body curled inward, shoulders hunched like he could fold himself small enough to vanish. "What if it wasn't just lies?" His voice trembled, barely audible. "What if we were never meant to exist the way we do? What if I was always meant to be… taken?"
The air curdled again, the shadows lengthening at his words.
Eli reached for him then, his hand trembling but insistent, clutching Elias's wrist hard enough to bruise. His chest heaved, rage and desperation burning in his eyes. "Don't you dare say that. You're here. With me. Not with her. Not with that thing. You're my brother. You hear me? You're mine!"
Elias's lips quivered. He nodded once, jerky, like a marionette barely held together by strings. But the haunted look in his eyes said something else something he couldn't confess.
Because in the dark corners of his mind, he still heard that silent infant hum. Still felt the woman's threads wrapping around his body, dragging him into the dark. Still saw the Spiral's eyeless gaze staring into him… as if it had never truly let go.
The corridor around them sighed. The mold dripped. The walls pulsed like veins.
And faintly, almost too faint to notice, a third heartbeat throbbed beneath their own.
And once again, Eli found himself inside the Eye.
He trembled, every breath scraping like glass in his throat, as the spiral walls folded inward around him. The world twisted into veins of red light, and at the center Elias.
His twin's screams tore through the void, raw and endless, splitting Eli's chest like knives. The sound wasn't just heard it was felt rattling his teeth, clawing into his ribs, searing itself into his marrow.
Eli staggered forward, hands outstretched, but the Eye pulsed, dragging Elias farther into its bleeding spiral. Shadows stitched across his brother's mouth, muffling his cries into something more inhuman, more devoured.
Eli's knees buckled. His own scream rose, but the Eye swallowed it whole, replacing it with a whisper that came from inside his own lungs.
You cannot save him… unless you trade yourself.
And then Elias's face contorted, drenched in horror snapped toward Eli, as though the Eye itself was forcing him to speak.
"Let me die."
The spiral tightened. The Eye blinked.